4 ms·
>In a competitive market, when you outsource, you get immediate costs savings. That's a good point. In addition, there's the (mostly) inevitable tendency for e
by kingsuper20 5y ago
>In a competitive market, when you outsource, you get immediate costs savings.
That's a good point. In addition, there's the (mostly) inevitable tendency for economies of scale to push for outsourcing. Several companies I've worked for shut down their board shops while I was there, there's just no way to practically keep up with that. Fabs got bigger. Specialty sheet metal shops can pound out the work faster than you can.
One related thing I've noticed is that older companies (dunno about places that make exclusively software) are never well equipped to deal with perpetually cheaper products with smaller margins.
As a side note, I suspect that the real magic in making toasters, if all done in-house and using simple inputs, is to design the manufacturing facility. The toaster itself is relatively simple. The Rouge must really have been something.
- genericone 5y agoWell for those reasons and more, every consumer hardware is about design for manufacturability these days. If you cant get the manufacturing right, scaling doesn't happen. Redesign will be costly or impossible without having those design methodologies front and center at the start. If your design is only possible with CNC, then say goodbye to the larger market.
- kingsuper20 5y agoI agree with you ('consumer' being the keyword if it's meant to mean 'high volume') but I wonder how a company digs it's way out of the situation defined in the thread's article. Is a company intended to become better at toaster components? push the component complexity down to a more basic level and then have more bespoke manufacturing done? or to become a manufacturer/final assembler and all that that really implies? The real answer I guess is to command that your outsourced engineers design in some IoT toaster sorcery that allows you to sell toaster information to third parties.
- Scene_Cast2 5y agoI've seen a couple of ways industries change on this. One is when a funded startup comes in and brings the necessary progress. Another is when the industry forms a group and tasks a neutral third party to carry out the R&D.